This invention relates to a printer and, more particularly, to a sheet feeder which supplies/discharges sheets of paper to be printed.
In a sheet feeder of a printer, sheets to be printed are taken out of a hopper by a feed roller, transferred through a sheet guide to a platen, printed by a print head on the platen, and then discharged.
The printed sheets are inserted between a drive roller having a rubber surface and being fixed to a drive shaft and a driven roller having a rubber surface, and then the sheets are discharged as the rollers rotate.
However, there is a problem that the rubber rollers tend to deteriorate the printing quality, because the rubber material soaks non-dried ink immediately after the printing and the soaked ink is transferred to the sheet, thus incurring stains on the sheets.
In order to solve this problem, a sheet feeder having metal drive and driven rollers has been proposed.
Although these metal rollers are indeed hardly stained with ink, they involve new problems of slip of sheets and instable discharging operation.